A Brief History of Cleopatra: Empress of Egypt

When Cleopatra took the throne of the kingdom of Egypt, the pyramids and Sphinx were already ancient wonders. As queen she faced conquest by a new, all-powerful empire. A Ptolemy, descended from a general of Alexander the Great who conquered the Nile as part of his Macedonian lands, her relationship with Mark Anthony has become one of the legendary love stories in history. Trow draws on recent archaeological finds and fresh interpretations of ancient texts to separate truth from myth and set this incomparably beautiful queen in context

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NOTES
1The top section collapsed in AD 796 and subsequent earthquakes over the centuries flattened it. The fifteenth-century fortress of Sultan Quait Bey stands on the site today.
2The name means seven stades (1 stade = 600 feet).
3Philo Embassy to Gaius 149–51 trans. F. H. Coulson, quoted in Tyldesley p 93.
4It must have been rather like the gigantic palace of the dictator Nicolai Ceausescu in Bucharest. Only the centre of this vast building is still used as government offices; the rest is one huge, echoing mausoleum to a failed regime.
5Strabo quoted in Barry Cunliffe Rome and Her Empire p 232.
6Suchos was the Greek name for Sobek, the crocodile-god.
7Strabo quoted in Barry Cunliffe Rome and Her Empire p 233.
8Strabo quoted in Barry Cunliffe Rome and Her Empire p 233.
9These terms are arbitrary and designed to help with understanding. They do not conform exactly to what is a notoriously controversial classification in the modern world.
10Guy de la Bédoyère Gods with Thunderbolts; Religion in Roman Britain (Stroud: Tempus, 2002) p 16.
11Plato quoted in Fletcher p 29.
12Although Alexander’s detractors point out that his astonishing campaign’s success against the Persians was achieved by only three battles – Granicus (334), Issus (333) and Gaugamala (331).
13Arrian (ad 86–160) History of Events After Alexander quoted in Fletcher p 38.
14In the twentieth century, the embalmed body of Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (Lenin) held a similarly sacred place in the hearts of his followers with queues filing past it in Moscow’s Red Square every day.
15Although her daughter called herself Cleopatra Selene (the moon) she did not rule Egypt as her mother had done.
16Herodotus II 46, quoted in Fletcher p 49.
17All this is highly dubious. Today’s African elephants are larger, not smaller than their Indian counterparts and are notoriously difficult to train, so accounts of their role at Raphia must be taken with more than a pinch of salt.
18Quoted in Fletch; er p 55.
19The instrument was more like an oboe than a flute, but both versions are used in Auletes’ context.
20The information in this section comes from Motherhood and Childbirth in Pharaonic Egypt S. Ashoush and A. Fahmy, Lectures in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Ain Shams University.
21Quoted in Fletcher p 57.
22Livy History of Rome 1.31
23Plutarch Lives – Numa XVII, quoted in Anthony Kamm The Romans (London: Routledge, 1995) p 9.
24Livy History of Rome 1.49.
25Cicero The Laws III.3 quoted in Kamm p 10.
26Livy History of Rome X5.
27Vegetus, quoted in Hughes and Forrest The Romans Discover Britain (CUP, 1981) p 35.
28This is not an original term; it means segmented breastplate but we have no idea what the Romans called it.
29Quoted in Philip Matyszak The Chronicle of the Roman Republic p 165.
30The father of Shakespeare’s Enobarbus.
31The Oscan language is an early form of Latin.
32Quoted in Matyszak Chronicle of the Roman Republic p 201.
33Ibid.
34Legions’ marching song, Suetonius Life of Caesar, quoted in Matyszak p 200.
35See Tom Holland, Rubicon.
36Cicero – Second Oration Against Catiline quoted in Matyszak p 213.
37Quoted in Fletcher Cleopatra the Great p 80.
38Funerary stela quoted in Tyldesley p 42.
39Plutarch, Life of Caesar ch 15.
40Petronius, Who’s Who in the Roman World (London: Routledge, 2001).
41Holland, Rubicon p 309.
42The name given to the hob-nailed sandal worn by soldiers.
43Quoted in Matyszak p 207.
44Plutarch Pompey trans Rex Warner p 241.
45Ibid.
46This is indeed how it was done in Carry On Cleo (1964) with Amanda Barrie as the queen and Kenneth Williams as Caesar.
47Stacy Schiff Cleopatra, A Life (Virgin, 2010) p 241 taken from Lucan.
48The Roman term for the Mediterranean was mare nostrum, our sea.
49By the English explorers Speke, Burton and Baker in the 1860s and 1870s.
50This is evidenced from a stela now in the Louvre, Paris, and is not necessarily accurate as it refers to ‘king Caesar’, a title given to Caesarion nowhere else.
51Most commentators today translate this as a telegram – ‘came; saw; conquered’. For those of us old enough to have ‘done’ Latin at school, this is nonsense. The ‘I’ is understood in this part of speech.
52There were several of these in late republican Rome. The colosseum had yet to be built.
53Re-enactments like this were still taking place in circuses into the twentieth century. In Britain the Royal Tournament at London’s Earl’s Court is a survivor of this sort of entertainment.
54Cicero Letters to Atticus 15:15.2 trans L. P. Wilkinson 1972.
55As described by Suetonius, Appian and Plutarch, but it may be pure legend.
56There is a long tradition of royal survival in history, with Arthur sleeping under his hill until his country needs him and the tsarevitch Alexei surviving the hail of bullets in the House of Special Purpose at Ekaterinburg in 1918.
57Erik Durschmied The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History (London Coronet, 1999).
58See Chapter 15.
59Cicero, quoted in Schiff p 151.
60Quoted in Schiff p 150.
61The lack of stirrups in the ancient world made cavalry less impressive than it became later with them. A recent television mini-series used stirrups on the grounds of health and safety!
62I believe the same is true of Vespasian who took Vectis, the Isle of Wight, in AD 43. There is no evidence of any opposition from the islanders.
63Cicero Ad Atticus 7, 8.
64Except perhaps ‘genistho’.
65Cicero Ad Atticus 10, 10.
66For all his Greekness, Plutarch was essentially as Roman a writer as Josephus, the Jewish chronicler who ‘came over to Rome’ in the first century AD.
67Goldsworthy Antony and Cleopatra p 273.
68Which is why, partly, Rome was so horrified by Boudicca in AD 60. The woman actually led her warriors in person.
69Suetonius Augustus 69.
70In the 1963 film, Roddy McDowell’s Octavian went one better and hurled the spear into the heart of Cleopatra’s ambassador.
71Quoted in Schiff p 243.
72Cassius Dio The Reign of Augustus trans Ian Scott-Kilvert, Penguin p 59.
73Cassius Dio The Reign of Augustus trans Ian Scott-Kilvert, Penguin p 61.
74Horace Odes Book I No 37 1914 trans. Quoted in History of Quotations, Cohen and Major.
75Cassius Dio Histories 51:15 trans E. Cary.
76Josephus Against Apion.
77Selgado. No source.
78To Helen 1845
79Carlo Maria Franzero The Life and Times of Cleopatra quoted in Joyce Tyldesley p 216.
80Fraser Hollywood History of the World p 18.
81There are huge gaps in the royal tomb record. The vast majority of the Ptolemies were buried in Alexandria, yet none of their bodies has been conclusively found. Likewise, we have no clear idea what became of the body of Alexander the Great after its removal from the Soma.
82Goldsworthy, Antony and Cleopatra (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010) p 395.
83All quotations from Jameson Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns 1838 pp 31–57.
84Arthur Weigall 1924 ed vi.
85Al-Masudi, quoted in Tyldesley p 212.
86Joyce Tyldesley, p 206.
87Stacy Schiff Cleopatra, A Life p 1.
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Campbell, Duncan, Greek and Roman Artillery (Oxford: Osprey, 2003).
de la Bèdoyére, Guy, Gods with Thunderbolts (Stroud: Tempus, 2002).
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Fletcher, Joann, Cleopatra the Great (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2008).
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Grant, Michael, From Alexander to Cleopatra: the Hellenistic World (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1982).
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Schiff, Stacy, Cleopatra, A Life (London: Virgin Books, 2010).
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Sekunda, Nicholas et al, Caesar’s Legions (Oxford: Osprey, 2000).
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Sifakis, Carl, Encyclopaedia of Assassinations (New York: Headline, 1993).
Southern, Pat, Pompey the Great (Stroud: Tempus, 2002).
Trow, M. J., Spartacus, the Myth and the Man (Stroud: Sutton, 2006).
Tyldesley, Joyce, Cleopatra, Last Queen of Egypt (London: Profile Books, 2009).
Volkmann, Hans, Cleopatra: A Study in Politics and Propaganda 1959.
von Wertheimer, Oskar, Cleopatra, A Regal Voluptuary 1931.
Weigall, Arthur, The Life and Times of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1914).
Williams, Derek, Romans and Barbarians (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999).
INDEX
Acarnania 196
Achillas 107, 115, 122, 123, 196
Actium, battle of 6, 195, 196–8, 207
Aeneas 61, 62, 89, 210
Aeneid 210
Aequians 63, 71
Agathoclea 39, 41
agriculture 14–15
Agrippa, Marcus Vipsanius 194, 197
Agrippina (mother of Nero) 36
Ahenobarbus, Gaius Domitius 83, 98, 100, 111, 178, 191, 194, 217
Ahenobarbus, Lucius Domitius 165
Al-Masudi 236
Alaric the Visigoth 111
Alesia, battle of 108, 164
Alexander of Macedon (the Great) 4–5, 19–21, 31–2, 33, 34, 53, 123, 127, 211
belief in own divinity 23, 24
crowned pharaoh 23, 32
death of 29–30, 32
tomb 6–7, 40
Alexander IV 31, 33
Alexander Helios 181, 187, 209
Alexandria 4–8, 12, 32, 38–9, 40, 48, 107, 116, 118, 125, 148, 229
founding of 4–5, 32
Great Caesarium 7, 148
Jewish community 124, 149, 212, 214
Library 6, 11, 38, 52, 122, 148
Nemesion 8
Pharos lighthouse 5–6, 229, 231
Serapion 8
Strabo’s account of 4–8
Timonium 7–8, 199
tomb of Alexander 6–7, 40
Amun 23, 24, 32
Amun-Ra 23
Amyot, Jacques 215
Anatolia 131
Antigonus I Monophthalmus 31
Antioch 182, 185
Antiochus III the Great 40, 41
Antiochus IV 42
Antiochus IX 45
Antiochus VIII Grypus 44, 45
Antipatros (father of Herod of Judaea) 123
Antipatros (regent of Alexander’s empire) 31
Antonia (warship) 6, 198, 199
Antonius, Caius 160, 161
Antonius, Marcus see Mark Antony
Antonius Antyllus, Marcus 177, 188, 189, 200, 202, 207
Antonius Creticus, Marcus 158, 159, 160
Antony and Cleopatra (Cibber) 220
Antony and Cleopatra (film) 136
Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare) 67, 215, 216–19
Anubis 126
Aphrodite 12, 25, 172
Apis bull 10, 19, 22, 107, 181
Apollodorus 118, 129
Appian 163, 211
Appian Way 71, 72, 136
archaeological finds 229–30
Archelaos 56, 97
Ariobarzanes of Cappadocia 111
Aristotle 51
Armenia 185, 186, 187, 193
Arminius 75
Arrian 31
Arruntius, Lucius 197
Arsinoe II 24, 36, 37, 38, 39
Arsinoe III 39, 40
Arsinoe IV 51, 121, 122, 123, 134, 150–1, 174, 175, 231–2
Artavasdes of Armenia 185, 186
Artemis 20, 51, 66
arts, Cleopatra’s portrayal in the 213–27
Asclepius 21
Athens 55, 80, 192
augurs 165, 179
Augustus, Emperor see Octavian
Auletes see Ptolemy XII Auletes
Babylon Fossatum 9
Bacchus 9, 66
banking 16
banquets 125, 173, 188–9
Banton, Travis 225
Bara, Theda 223
barge, Cleopatra’s 106–7, 172, 219
Bastet 20
battle formations, Roman 76–7
Beerbohm Tree, Herbert 220
Berenice II 39
Berenice III 46
Berenice IV 47, 51, 54, 56, 57, 96, 97
Berkeley, Busby 224
Bernhardt, Sarah 220
Bes 49, 126
Bibulus, Marcus Calpurnius 95
birthing-houses 49, 50, 147–8
bitumen trade 183, 193
black Cleopatra 41, 48, 227, 232–3
Bogud of Mauretania 195
Boudicca 37, 196
Britons 37, 76
Brundisium 111, 166, 178
Brutus, Decimus 169
Brutus, Lucius Junius 65
Brutus, Marcus Junius 141, 151, 153, 156, 157, 167
Buchis bull 103–4, 106
bull cult 10, 19, 22–3, 103–4, 106, 107, 126, 181
bureaucracy, Egyptian 16–17, 37
Burton, Richard 225, 226
Caesar and Cleopatra (film) 224–5
Caesar and Cleopatra (Shaw) 220–1
Caesar, Julius 8, 17, 54, 64, 89–95, 109–16, 130, 131–2
alleged homosexuality 77, 90–1
assassination of 78, 141–2, 145
crosses the Rubicon 110, 112, 166
dictator of Rome 133, 139, 140
and Egyptian civil war 116, 117–18, 121–3
family background 89–90
first triumvirate 85, 94–5
Gallic wars 97, 98, 108
Great Caesarium, Alexandria 7, 148
invasion of Britain 77
meets Cleopatra 118–21
military career 90, 94–5
Nile progress with Cleopatra 128
offered kingship 133, 140
political offices 91–2, 93
Pontifex Maximus 92, 133
relationship with Cleopatra 121, 123–8, 134–9, 146–7
and Roman civil wars 109–14, 131–2, 166, 168
will 139–40
Caesarion 128, 129–30, 135, 140, 147, 150, 153, 174, 182, 184, 187, 191, 199–200, 202, 212–13
Cagnacci, Guido 219
calendar
Egyptian 38
Julian 139
Caligula, Emperor 208
Callimachos 109, 127
Calpurnia (wife of Julius Caesar) 120, 141, 145
Cameron, James 227
Camillus, Marcus 71
Cannae, battle of 73
Canopus 229
Cappadocia, Cappadocians 111, 193
Capua 62–3
Caratacus 137
carpet legend 117, 118, 120
Carrhae, battle of 99
Carry on Cleo (film) 118, 242
Carthage 72, 74
Casca, Publius 141
Cassius Dio, Lucius 138, 156, 197, 198, 203, 211, 230
Cassius Longinus, Gaius 141, 151, 153–4, 157, 165, 166
Catalina, Lucius Sergius 92–3
Cataline conspiracy 92–3, 161
Catherine the Great of Russia 234
Cato, Gaius Porcius 85
Cato, Marcus Porcius (the Elder) 74
Cato, Marcus Porcius (the Younger) 55, 94, 96, 100, 108, 132
Catulus, Quintus Lutatius 79, 92
Caudine Forks, battle of the 70
cavalry
Parthian 99, 185
Roman 77
Ceausescu, Nicolai 239
census 139
Charmion 106, 201, 203, 204
Chaucer, Geoffrey 213–14
childbirth, Egyptian 50–1, 129
Christianity 25
Christina of Sweden 234
Cibber, Colley 220
Cicero, Marcus Tullius 61, 67, 90, 93, 98, 101, 108, 131, 138, 146, 147, 155, 156, 158, 159, 167, 168, 169
Cilicia, Cilicians 159, 168, 183, 187
Cilician Gates, battle of the 182
Cimber, Tillius 141
Cinna, Lucius Cornelius 80
Cisalpine Gauls 71
civil service, Egyptian 16, 37
Claudius, Emperor 208
Claudius Caecus, Appius 72
Claudius Pulcher, Appius 100
Cleomenes 31, 39–40
Cleopatra I 41, 42
Cleopatra II 42, 43, 44
Cleopatra III 44, 45
Cleopatra IV 45
Cleopatra V Tryphaena 44, 45, 47, 51, 54, 56, 96, 97
Cleopatra VII
attire 105–6
birth and early life 48–54
black Cleopatra thesis 41, 48, 227, 232–3
children see Alexander
Helios; Caesarion;
Cleopatra Selene;
Ptolemy Philadelphus
co-rulership 57, 98, 102, 120, 124, 150, 184, 187
education 52–3
and Egyptian civil war 109–10, 114, 116, 117–18, 121–3
family background see Ptolemies
fatale monstrum portrayal 12, 211, 228–9
in art, film and literature 213–27
Isis identification 12, 24–5, 106, 126, 138, 147, 149, 172, 187, 208
language skills 53–4, 109–10, 194
legendary and historical accounts 209–12, 233–7
and Mark Antony’s suicide 202
marries Antony 182–3
marries Caesar 124
meets Caesar 118–21
meets Mark Antony 57, 163, 171–3
meets Octavian 202–3
mixed heritage 34
physical appearance 120, 233
relationship with Caesar 121, 123–8, 134–9, 146–7
relationship with Mark Antony 171–7, 184, 185–7, 188–9
sexuality 119, 120, 173–4
snake legend 204, 210, 219
suicide 203–4
temple-building 147–8
tomb 7, 229–31
visits Rome 55–6, 96–7, 134–9, 149–50
wealth 16, 174, 184, 200, 203
Cleopatra Selene 44, 45, 181, 187, 209, 212
Cleopatra (film: DeMille) 222, 223–4
Cleopatra (film: Mankiewicz) 225–6
Cleopatre (Massenet) 221
Clodius Pulcher, Publius 93, 100–1, 161–2, 164
coinage 16, 33, 110, 130, 149, 183, 187, 208
Colbert, Claudette 223
Collier, Constance 220
Commagenians 111
consuls 66, 68, 70, 74–5, 81, 82, 169, 191
contraception 148
Cornelia (wife of Pompey the Great) 99–100, 114, 115
Corsica 179
cosmetics 172
courtesans 161, 166–7
Crassus, Marcus Licinius 54, 68–9, 70–1, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 92, 94–5, 99, 137, 163, 174, 185
Crassus, Publius Canidius 189, 193, 196
Crete 159, 183, 187
Crocodilopolis 10
Curio, Gaius Scribonius 112, 160, 166
Cybiosictes 56
Cyprus 121, 151, 172, 183
Cyrenia 23, 43, 44, 183, 187
Dante 214
Deiotarus 111
deities
Egyptian 12, 19–20, 21, 22–5, 38–9, 49, 103–4, 126
Greek 20, 21, 24–5, 31, 51
Roman 19, 20, 66
Dellius, Quintus 157, 170, 171, 194, 209
DeMille, Cecil B. 222, 223–4
Dendera 11, 24, 127, 147, 181
Dido of Carthage 210
Didymus 148
Diodorus Siculus 12
Dionysus 37, 66, 99, 139, 172, 180, 187
Neos Dionysus 8–9, 40, 47, 106, 172
Divine Comedy (Dante) 214
Dolabella, Gnaeus Cornelius 91
Dolabella, Publius Cornelius 152, 153, 168
Donations of Alexandria 186–7, 207
Dyrrachium 113
eagle emblem 33, 46, 77
economy, Egyptian 16, 37–8, 149
Edfu 147
education 17, 52–3
Egypt
administration 16
civil war 109–10, 114, 116, 117–18, 121–3
Egypt–Rome relationship, start of 38
Greek culture 13, 15, 16, 31–2
Lower Egypt 12, 20
Persian rule 31
population 12
Roman rule 208
social structure 13–17
Upper Egypt 12, 130
way of life 11, 12, 14–15
see also Alexandria
‘Egyptians’ in Elizabethan age 215–16
elephants 40, 73, 132, 240
Elizabeth I of England 234
Elliott, Gertrude 220
embalming 25, 102, 183, 203
Ephesus 56, 151, 175, 231, 232
Etruscans 63, 71
eunuchs 14
Fabius Maximus, Quintus 73
Fadia (wife of Mark Antony) 161, 166
films 136, 222–7
Forbes-Robertson, Johnston 220
Forum Gallorum, battle of 169
Franzero, Carlo Maria 225
Fulvia 156, 169, 177, 178, 179
Gabinius, Aulus 56, 57, 97, 98, 162, 163
Galatians 111
Gallic wars 97, 98, 108
Gallius, Quintus Fabius 161
Gallus, Gaius Cornelius 8, 9, 201, 202, 208
games, Roman 66, 79, 92, 100, 134
Ganymedes (tutor to Arsinoe IV) 123
Gaugamala, battle of 240
Geb 24
Gilead balm 183
Gindarus, battle of 182
Goddio, Franck 229
Graceo-Egyptian cults 8, 22, 24, 25, 30, 41
Granger, Stewart 224
Granicus, battle of 240
Greek culture 13, 15, 16, 31–2, 62
Greek deities 20, 21, 24–5, 31, 51
Hamilcar Barca 72, 75
handwriting, Cleopatra’s 189
Hannibal 66, 73, 74, 75, 110
Harrison, Rex 226
Hathor 24, 49, 50
Hatshepsut 105
Hawass, Zahi 229
Heliopolis 20, 126
Helvetii 97
Heraclion 229
Herod of Judaea 182, 183–4, 193
Herodotus 9, 15–16, 20, 21, 39, 52, 104
Herwennefer of Thebes 40, 41
Hippocrates 50
Homer 19, 52, 62
homosexuality 77, 90–1
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) 209–10
Hortensius, Quintus 55
Horus 23, 25, 126, 130, 147
Ides of March 140–1, 169
Imhotep 21
incestuous relationships 9, 23, 36, 120
infant mortality 51, 130
Inimitable Livers 176, 180, 200
Iras 201, 203, 204
Isis 12, 20, 24–5, 50, 106, 126, 138, 147, 148, 149, 172, 187, 208, 213
Islam 24, 213
Issus, battle of 240
Iturea 183
Iunu 20, 126
Jameson, Anna Brownell 233–6
Jerusalem 183
Jews of Alexandria 124, 149, 212, 214
Jolie, Angelina 227
Jonson, Ben 216
Josephus, Titus Flavius 149, 150, 184, 211–12
Juba of Mauretania 212
Juba of Numidia 112, 132, 166
Judaea 84, 153, 162, 183
Jugurtha of Numidia 79
Julian calendar 139
Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 217
Jupiter 20, 66
Karnak 11
Khmun 126
Kuznetsova, Maria 221
Labienus, Titus 113
Laenas, Caius Popillius 42
Langtry, Lillie 220
languages 53–4
Lebanon 183
Legend of Good Women (Chaucer) 213–14
legions 76–7, 185
Leiber, Fritz 223
Leigh, Vivien 225
Leighton, Frederick 219–20
Lenin, Vladimir Ilich 240
Lentulus Sura, Publius Cornelius 159, 160, 161
Lepidus, Marcus 112, 151, 155, 156, 166, 170, 177, 178
Leuce Come 185
Library of Alexandria 6, 11, 38, 52, 122, 148
Livy (Titus Livius) 63, 65, 70
Lower Egypt 12, 20
Lucretia 65
Lucullus, Lucius 84, 85
Luxor 11
Lysimachos of Thrace 31, 36
Maatranefer 21
Maccabeus, Simon 214
McDowall, Roddy 226
Macedonia, Macedonians 16, 42
Mankiewicz, Joseph L. 225
Marcellus, Gaius Claudius 108–9
Marcellus, Marcus Claudius 73
Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria 234
Marius, Gaius 75, 79, 80, 82, 90, 159
Marius–Sulla civil war 79–80, 90, 158–9
Mark Antony 4, 8, 17, 97, 109, 130–1, 133, 140, 153, 154, 155–6, 158–70
appearance 161
at war with Octavian 191–201
augur 165, 166
birth and early life 158–60
and Caesar’s assassination 141, 145, 146
and civil wars 152, 153–7, 166, 167–8, 169–70, 191–201
consulship 169, 193
drunkenness 131, 166, 172, 189
marries Cleopatra 190
Master of the Horse 168, 169
meets Cleopatra 57, 163, 171–3
military appointments 162, 163–4, 167
Neos Dionysus 172, 180, 187
offers kingship to Caesar 133, 140
Parthian campaign 174, 177, 180, 182, 184–6
relationship with Caesar 163–4, 165, 167
relationship with Cleopatra 171–7, 180–3, 184, 185–7, 188–9
relationship with Octavian 155, 178–9, 186, 189–91
Roman marriages 161, 166–7, 169
second triumvirate 151, 155–6, 164, 169, 170, 177–9
suicide 202
tomb 7
Tribune of the Plebs 165, 166
will 191
marriage celebrations
Cleopatra and Antony 182–3
Cleopatra and Caesar 124
Masque of the Gypsies Metamorphosed (Jonson) 216
Massenet, Jules 221
Mauretania 193, 212
Media 185, 187
Méliès, Georges 222
Memphis 12, 21–2, 31, 33, 41, 107, 126
Mendes 39
Menelaus of Sparta 19
Metellus, Lucius Caecilius 112
Metellus Nepos, Quintus Caecilius 93
Metellus Pius, Quintus Caecilius 80, 81, 82, 84
Metellus Scipio, Quintus Caecilius 99, 109, 132
Methone 195
Michelangelo Buonarotti 214–15
Milo, Titus Annius 100–1, 164
Minucius Thermus, Marcus 90
Misenum, Peace of 179
Mithridates VI of Pontus 56, 80, 84
Mnevis bull 126
Molon, Apollonius 91
Montu 50, 104
Mount Amanus, battle of 182
mummification 20, 21, 22, 42, 232
Museion, Alexandria 6, 11, 38, 52, 122, 148
music 127
Nabatean Arabs 193
naval battles 196–7
Nectanebo 32, 33
Nero, Emperor 208
Nicholas II, Tsar 104–5
Nicolas of Damascus 209
Nicomedes of Bithynia 90, 91, 119
Nile 5, 13, 15, 106, 130, 148
Cleopatra and Caesar’s journey down 124–8
North, Thomas 215
Numa Pompilius 64
Numidia 132
obelisks 15
obstetrics, Egyptian 49–51, 53, 148
Octavia (wife of Mark Antony) 179, 180, 181, 186, 192, 207
Octavian 3, 10, 19, 64, 138, 140, 154, 179, 181, 186, 208–9
at war with Cleopatra and Antony 191–201
and civil wars 153–4, 155, 156, 157, 169–70, 177, 178, 191–201
public building works 190–1
relationship with Mark Antony 155, 178–9, 186, 189–91, 200
second triumvirate 151, 155–6, 164, 169, 170, 177–9
takes the name Augustus 3–4, 139, 212
visits Alexander’s tomb 7
Oenanthe 41
Olympus (physician to Cleopatra) 202, 204, 211
orations 179
Osiris 20, 25, 38, 103–4, 147, 172
Ostia 139
Pacorus of Parthia 177
Parallel Lives (Plutarch) 211, 215, 233–4
Parthia, Parthians 79, 95, 99, 140, 174, 177, 180, 182, 184–5, 187
Pasherentptah III 13, 182
Paullus, Lucius Aemilius 73
Pausanius 45
pearl dissolved in vinegar 188
Pelusium 57, 123, 162–3, 201
Per-Baster 19–20
Perdiccas 30, 31, 32, 33
Persians 20, 22, 30, 31, 240
Perusia 178
Petronius 108
Petubastis 13, 182
pharaoh, office of 13, 21
pharaonic regalia 24, 106, 126
Pharnaces of Pontus 131
Pharos lighthouse 5–6, 229, 231
Pharsalus, battle of 113–14, 152, 168
Philip Arrhidaios 30–1
Philippi, battles of 157, 170
Philo of Alexandria 7
Philostratus 52
Phoenicia 183, 187
piracy 54, 84, 91, 96
plague 149, 153
Plancus, Lucius Munatius 188–9, 194, 209, 212
Plato 21, 51
Plutarch 25, 54, 64, 106, 108, 115, 120, 162, 164, 171, 173, 184, 193, 203, 211, 215, 230, 233–4
Poliorcetes, Demetrios 211
Polybius 41
polygamy 39
Pompey, Gnaeus 84, 131, 132
Pompey, Sextus 128, 131, 132, 178, 179, 186, 194
Pompey the Great (Gaius Pompeius Magnus) 33, 55–7, 64, 80, 83–5, 93, 97, 99–100, 101, 108, 113–15, 124, 164, 165
and civil war 109–12, 113–14, 131
first triumvirate 54, 85, 94–5
murder of 8, 115, 116
Pontifex Maximus 67, 82, 92, 133
Potheinos 107, 109, 116, 117, 121, 122, 150
Praenoste 10–11
priests
Egyptian 13, 21, 22, 23, 32, 37, 43, 107–8, 127
Roman 165
Proculeius, Caius 202
professionalization of the soldier 77
Propertius, Sextus 210
Ptah 21, 22, 38, 126
Ptolemaia festival 37
Ptolemies 5, 10, 12, 13, 24, 33–4, 35–47, 48–9, 53
co-rulership 36, 39, 42, 43, 56, 57, 98, 102, 120, 124, 150, 184, 187
incestuous relationships 9, 23, 36, 120
internecine murders 35–6, 39, 43, 44, 46, 57, 97, 175
Ptolemy I Soter 4, 5, 6, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 53
Ptolemy II 36, 37, 39, 77
Ptolemy III 38, 39, 41
Ptolemy IV Philopator 39–40
Ptolemy V Epiphanes 38, 40, 41–2
Ptolemy VI Philomater 42, 43
Ptolemy VII Neos Philopator 35, 43
Ptolemy VIII Physcon 35, 43–4, 53
Ptolemy IX Soter Lathyrus 44, 45, 46
Ptolemy X Alexander 44, 45–6
Ptolemy XI Alexander II 46
Ptolemy XII Auletes 46–7, 48, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 82, 85, 95–8, 101–2, 107, 120, 127
death of 101–2
Neo Dionysus 8–9, 47
visits Rome 55–6, 96–7
will 102
Ptolemy XIII 6, 102, 105, 107, 109, 114–15, 117–18, 121, 123, 150, 151, 174, 175
Ptolemy XIV 121, 124, 129, 130, 135, 146, 149–50
Ptolemy XV Caesar see Caesarion
Ptolemy Apion 44, 46
Ptolemy Memphites 43, 44
Ptolemy Philadelphus 184, 187, 209
Punic Wars 72–4
pyramids 10, 15
Ra 20, 23, 25, 28, 104
Rabirius Postumus, Gaius 95–6, 98
Rains, Claude 224
Rakhotis 4
Regulus, Marcus Atilius 72
religion
Egyptian 18–25, 37
Graceo-Egyptian cults 8, 22, 24, 25, 30, 41
Roman 66
see also bull cult; deities
Renaissance 214–15
rhetoric 53, 91, 159
Rhodes 33, 55, 96
Rhodon (tutor to Caesarion) 213
Robson, Flora 224–5
Roman army 69, 71, 75–7
mutinies 167, 168–9
Roman deities 19, 20, 66
Roman roads 71–2
Romanov dynasty 104–5, 221
Rome
civil wars 79–80, 90, 92–3, 109–12, 131–2, 151–7, 152, 158–9, 167–8, 169–70, 177, 178, 189, 191–201
Egypt bequeathed to 43, 95
Egypt–Rome relationship, start of 38
‘Egyptomania’ 4, 208
first incursion into Graceo-Egyptian affairs 42, 43
founding and early history 61–5
kingship 63, 64–5, 81, 212
military power 70–7
republican government 13, 65–8, 74
social structure 63–4
territorial expansion 64, 74
Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare) 216
Romulus and Remus 61, 62
Rosetta Stone 38, 41
Rubicon 109, 110, 112
Rudin, Scott 227
Rufus, Marcus Caelius 112–13
Rullus, Publius Servilius 95
Sabines 63
Sakkara 22
Samnites 70, 71
Sardinia 179
Satricia 71
Schiff, Stacy 11, 119, 134, 136, 209, 226–7, 237
scholarship, Egyptian 38, 53, 148
Scipio Africanus 73–4
Scribonia (wife of Octavian) 179
Seleucia, Seleucids 39, 40, 41, 42, 182
Seleucus of Babylonia 31, 36
senate 67–8, 132–3, 160, 164, 192, 193
Serapeum, Memphis 33
Serapeum, Sakkara 22
Serapion, Alexandria 8
Serapion (governor of Cyprus) 151, 153, 175
Serapis 22, 30
Sertorius 82, 84
Shakespeare, William 63, 106, 164, 171, 172, 215, 216–19
Shaw, George Bernard 220–1, 224
Sicily 72, 112, 178, 179
slavery 14, 64, 68
see also Spartacus
snake legend 204, 210, 219
Sobek 38, 126
Soderbergh, Steven 227
Sosigenes 52
Sosius, Gaius 191
Sparta 51
Spartacus 40, 64, 70, 71, 82–3, 99, 153
Strabo 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9–10, 11–12, 72
Suetonius Tranquillis, Gaius G. 211
Sulla, Lucius Cornelius 79–81, 82, 83, 90, 91
Syria 39, 84, 153, 163, 175, 177, 182, 183, 187
Taposiris Magna 230
Tarquinius Priscus 64
Tarquinius, Sextus 65
Tarquinius Superbus 64–5, 78
Tarsus 171, 172–3
Taweret 49
taxation
Egyptian 14, 16, 37, 107, 149, 189
Roman 179, 192
Taylor, Elizabeth 225, 226
Teutoberg Forest, massacre in the 71
Thapsus, battle of 132, 152
Thea (daughter of Cleopatra II) 44
Thebes 42, 127
Theodotus 52, 107, 116
Thoth 126
Thrace 193
Tiber, River 62
Tigranes of Armenia 84
Timonium, Alexandria 7–8, 199
Torone 195
trade 8, 16, 38, 66, 72, 183
triumphs 71, 74–5, 83, 85, 94, 133–4, 209
triumvirate
first 54, 85, 94–5
second 151, 155–6, 164, 169, 170, 177–9
Trojan War 19, 61, 62
Tullus Hostilius 63
Upper Egypt 12, 130
Valerius Corvus, Marcus 71
Varro, Gaius Terentius 73
Varus, Publius Attius 112
Varus, Publius Quinctilius 71
Vegetius 75–6
Ventidius, Publius 182
Vercingetorix 75, 134
Vespasian, Emperor 243
Vestal Virgins 36, 67–8, 139, 165, 191
Victoria, Queen 234
Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 210
Volscians 63, 71
Volumnia (courtesan) 131, 166–7
Wallis, Ellen 220
war-galleys 196–7
weapons 76, 160
Weigall, Arthur 236
Wilcoxon, Henry 223, 224
William, Warren 223
women
education 17, 52–3
Egyptian 15, 17, 49–50
Greek 51
pregnancy and childbirth 49–51
Roman 36–7, 67, 68, 209
Younge, Elizabeth 219
Zama, battle of 73–4
Zeus 5, 20, 66
BOOK ONE: ISIS BURNING
1
THE WORLD
ALEXANDRIA AD AEGYPTU, 27
Three years after the death of Queen Cleopatra, a Greek traveller from Amisea in Pontus on the Black Sea arrived in Egypt. His name was Strabo, the Squint-eyed, and he was there on the staff of Greece’s praefectus (governor), Gaius Cornelius Gallus. It is likely that Strabo’s boss was from Frejus in southern Gaul (hence the name) and he was about to be recalled to Rome to answer charges, possibly of treason. Strabo could not fail to notice that there were a large number of statues of Gallus dotted all over the place, where there should have been nothing but statues of his boss, Gaius Julius Caesar, known to us as Octavian. It was a sign of the times that Octavian had begun, in the last months, to call himself Augustus, the divinely ordained. It is no exaggeration to say that Augustus’ status as first citizen (emperor in all but name), and even his title, came about as a direct result of events in Egypt over the previous three years.
Strabo was a geographer, although, in the century before the birth of Christ, the science was rarely divorced from history and the whole package was an art, given to flights of fancy and downright fiction. Strabo wrote down what he saw in Egypt but he also believed all sorts of tittle-tattle fed to him by Romans, Alexandrians and Egyptians. The result, while short on accuracy, gives us a fascinating picture of the land that was Cleopatra’s and which had just become Rome’s newest province.
Inevitably, what impressed Strabo most was its capital, Alexandria. So astonishing was this and so different from the rest of the country that it was known as Alexandria ad Aegyptu – next to Egypt. If he had visited Rome recently, Strabo would have noticed the ‘Egyptomania’ sweeping that city – obelisks and archaic statuary were appearing in the Forum and at crossroads. Ironically, many Romans had worried that Cleopatra and her lover, the triumvir Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony) wanted to shift the capital of the empire to Alexandria. Now, it seemed, Alexandria was coming to Rome.
Cleopatra’s Alexandria, the one Strabo marvelled at in 27, was 300 years old. Technically, Rome’s population was larger, but the Italian city on its seven hills lacked the space, order and sumptuousness of the city founded by Alexander the Great. Like every other city in the ancient world, there was a mythical, supernatural story of its founding. More prosaically, the site was perfect. A small fishing village, Rakhotis, clustered on the shore between Lake Mareotis and the Mediterranean Sea. Alexander – and his general Ptolemy who began the actual building – needed links to Greece, his homeland of Macedonia and the rest of the empire he was carving out in the 320s; the sea provided that. The lake, via a series of canals, led to the Nile, the lifeblood of Egypt whose source, men said, was far to the south in the Mountains of the Moon. The city that Strabo saw was laid out on a lavish grid pattern, which divided the place into five districts – Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon – making Alexandria the first settlement in the world to have clear postal addresses. It was always a cosmopolitan city – Strabo could have talked Latin and Greek anywhere throughout it – but archaeological and other evidence implies that the ethnic groupings – Greek, Jew and Egyptian – kept to themselves in their quarters. Inevitably, in a city founded by the Greeks, it was they who were Alexandria’s elite, scholars and merchants living in grand limestone and marble houses nearest to the vast sprawl of the royal palaces in the Beta district. Only they, at first, could become full citizens.
Strabo had been told – and there is no reason to doubt this – that the Ptolemies who had ruled Egypt for three centuries had been inveterate builders, each one adding another palace extension to commemorate their reign. By 27 these buildings, where both Cleopatra and Antony had died by their own hands, covered between a quarter and a third of the city. On the island of Pharos, the first Ptolemy commissioned one of the seven wonders of the world – a 328-foot-tall lighthouse made of gleaming white stone. It was the tallest building the Greeks ever erected, and Rome never surpassed it. On top was a huge statue of Zeus Soter (the saviour father of the gods) and a series of mirrors that reflected a perpetual flame that shone into the night. Strabo says the lighthouse had many tiers (contemporary depictions show three) and that each stage had a different shape – rectangular, octagonal and cylindrical – probably to show off Greek architectural skill or to give the colossal edifice strength.1
From the lighthouse, a causeway called the Heptastadion2 ran to the city, dividing the harbour into two. Kitosis (the Box) was the city’s dockyard where Cleopatra’s war-galleys and river barges would have been built. The eastern harbour was Megas Limen (which the Romans called Portus Magnus) and the western, rather smaller, was Eunostos (the Happy Return). It was into these sheltered waters that Cleopatra sailed her warship the Antonia in September 31, the decks bright with flowers and garlands, as though returning from a victory. In fact, she had just left the more turbulent and bloody waters of Actium, which marked the beginning of her end.
Strabo, the Greek scholar, would have been most fascinated by the Museion, the place of the cure of the soul, which was the largest library in the world. Ptolemy I and his successors borrowed works of Greek culture over the years from Delphi and elsewhere and copied them – they sent the copies back and kept the originals themselves. These books (actually scrolls) and the scholars who floated around them, copying and researching, were at the disposal of the child Cleopatra in her time, and of her children by Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Never again would so much scholarship be concentrated in one place, although a section of the building and its contents had been destroyed twenty years before when Caesar used the adjacent Great Theatre as his headquarters against the army of Cleopatra’s brother, Ptolemy XIII.
Strabo would have seen the Soma, the dazzling tomb of Alexander with its Egyptian-style gold sarcophagus in a translucent glass case. People came from all over the world to pay homage to the greatest general in history and Strabo would have heard the story of three years earlier, when Octavian had come calling to claim the country as his own. He had demanded the removal of the sarcophagus lid and had strewn the embalmed hero with flowers. In doing so, he accidentally knocked off Alexander’s nose. Strabo may have seen, but does not mention, the tombs of Antony and Cleopatra, lying side by side in death as they did in life. He may have known that Octavian had refused to visit the tombs of the earlier Ptolemies and probably thought it best not to mention his own visit, if he made one. The newly half-deified Augustus did not tolerate opposition, as Gallus was about to find out.
Strabo saw the huge temple of Poseidon, the sea-god; the Great Caesarium, still under construction, as Cleopatra’s own memorial to Julius Caesar. In AD 40, Alexandria’s home-grown Jewish philosopher Philo wrote of this place:
For there is elsewhere no precinct like that which is called the Sebastium, a temple to Caesar on the shipboard, situated on an eminence facing the harbours ... huge and conspicuous, fitted on a scale not found elsewhere with dedicated offerings, around it a girdle of pictures and statues in silver and gold, forming a precinct of vast breadth, embellished with porticoes, libraries, chambers, groves, gateways and wide open courts and everything which lavish expenditure could produce to beautify it.3
He would have walked through the marble colonnades to the Temple of Saturn and the Gymnasion, which served as a public forum for the rulers of Alexandria and had been the site of ghastly wholesale slaughters by Cleopatra’s ancestors. He would also have seen the Timonium, a sad little summer house near the harbour that Mark Antony had built on his return from Actium, unable for a while to function or to face the world. Most famous of all, Strabo would have visited the Serapion, a temple designed to unite the Greek and Egyptian gods in a successful working partnership that lasted for 300 years.
It may be that Strabo noted the vast difference between the hush and academic peace of the royal palaces, now empty of the Ptolemies and only partly occupied by Gallus4 and the bustle of the cosmopolitan city outside its walls. Here, in the quarters, lived and worked the multi-nationals whose ancestors had sometimes toppled kings and pharaohs. The trading vessels groaned with wheat, linen, glass, perfumes, spices and papyri from the Nile and Africa to the south. The city itself was famed for its glass, pottery, baskets and linen. All human life was there, the descendants of men and women who had known rule by Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and now Romans.
Somewhere in the city, Strabo saw the cemeteries that housed Alexandria’s dead, probably laid out to the east and west of the palaces. Here was the Nemesion, the temple of retribution built by Julius Caesar to house the severed head of his rival Gaius Pompeius (Pompey the Great) who had been murdered on the shore not far away.
The geographer was clearly impressed by the splendour of Cleopatra’s city but the Roman puritan in him was never far below the surface. Wandering around the Navalia, the dockyards, he noted ‘on boats [there was] flute-playing and dancing without restraint, with the utmost lewdness’.5 Cleopatra’s father had been called Auletes, the flute-player, by the Greeks, and was also called Neo Dionysus, a reincarnation of the drunken god whom the upright Romans despised as Bacchus. It was a reminder, if one was needed, that Egypt’s way was not Rome’s way and that Gallus and his successors had a duty to do something about this.
Sailing up the Nile, Strabo was transported back in time. The story of Cleopatra was essentially the story of Alexandria and of Rome. Alone of her family, she had learned the Egyptian demotic language and sailed the river often to worship at the various cult shrines along the way, but for most of her life she lived in an alien Greek city and died there, brought to suicide by Roman politics. There is a sense in which, whoever ruled from Alexandria, life for the people along the Nile remained the same. The country was long and narrow, skirting the river that was its lifeblood. Some areas were so remote the Romans never reached them and the Egyptians were a simple, superstitious and inbred people where incest was perfectly common in the natural order of things. Someone told Herodotus of Halicarnassus in the fifth century that women here urinated standing up and the men sitting down. In a society in which people worshipped crocodiles and bowed to gods with the heads of jackals, hawks and baboons, why should he doubt it? At Babylon Fossatum, Strabo came upon a huge army camp, one of those rectangular bastions of empire, built solidly of earthworks, ramparts, towers and palisades. Three legions were based here, the men who had fought first for Antony, then for Octavian in the miserable, dishonourable war that had just finished. One hundred and fifty slaves toiled under the murderous Egyptian sun on a giant treadmill that lifted drinking water for the 2,000 men in the camp. Strabo would have noticed that the fresh sea breezes of Alexandria were far away and the towns and villages along the river small, cramped and dirty.
It was the history of the place, as much as the geography, that captivated him. He saw the pyramids, already ancient when Rome was a cluster of huts; and sphinxes, those strange, crouching animalistic gods half-buried in the ever shifting sand. He visited the sacred bull of Apis, which Octavian had refused to see and which Cleopatra had worshipped, as had all her predecessors. At Arsinoe, he came across Crocodilopolis, a shrine where the priests lovingly looked after a sacred crocodile. ‘It is called Petesuchos,’ Strabo recorded,6 ‘and is fed on grain and bits of meat and wine, which are always offered to it by the visiting foreigners.’7 The animal also wore gold ‘earrings’ and bracelets on his forefeet.
What Strabo was looking at was a country in decline. The Ptolemies had ruled this land for 300 years and had amassed a fortune in doing so. Egypt was rich and the principal supplier of grain for Rome and its empire, but the general sense that Strabo had was similar to that of the English poet Shelley eighteen centuries later. Egypt was an ‘antique land’ in desperate need of renovation. In Strabo’s day, the Romans had only been there for three years and it was clearly early days. Even so, he wrote that ‘to the best of their abilities they have, I might say, set most things right’.8
The floor mosaic in a sanctuary at Praenoste near Rome, dating from around Cleopatra’s time, shows the Nile in full flood as the Romans imagined it. Exotic animals – lions, giraffes, rhinoceros, hippopotami, giant centipedes, camels and others clearly invented in the artist’s imagination – are caught by the rising waters, and towers and temples stand like islands in the torrent. It is not accurate (unsurprisingly) and although an astonishing work of art, does not help us understand Cleopatra’s country very well. One of the queen’s recent biographers, Stacy Schiff, astutely observes that Cleopatra is absent when there is no Roman in the room. This has nothing to do with the queen herself and everything to do with the Egyptian and Roman methods of recording history. Rome, in the form of its language and its law, continued to dominate intellectual Europe for the next 1,500 years. Scholars of later generations venerated Rome as one of the great civilizations of the ancient world, so anything a Roman had to say, about kingship, war, religion, even how to handle slaves and what sort of hat to wear in the sun, became hugely important and was preserved. Egypt, by contrast, was a culture of a very different sort and not ‘discovered’ until Napoleon’s invasion of the country in 1798. Egyptian records were curiously parochial, as if there was no world outside the land along the Nile and the bas-reliefs and the tomb paintings reflect a world of men interacting with gods in a half-understood magic. There are no Egyptian gossips, at least none whose writings have survived.
One particular blank – which could not be filled in by Strabo and is difficult to fill at all – is the daily routines of Egypt in Cleopatra’s time. There is a timeless quality about ancient history. When we look at the giant bas-reliefs on temples at Karnak, Dendera and Luxor, we are looking at gods from 3,000 years earlier still being worshipped in Cleopatra’s reign. The men rowing on the Nile are doing so in boats that have not changed for two millennia. They are cutting down reeds and wheat at harvest time exactly as their forebears had done for centuries. No one comments on this because it had been a way of life for so long that it was not worthy of comment. Strabo waxes lyrical about Alexandria’s library because it was unique. He tells us almost nothing about the fishermen at the waterside because there were so many of them. The way of life was agricultural and the success of the harvest – geared entirely to the Nile’s movements – made the difference between life and death. Since almost all our records of Cleopatra come from the pens of her enemies and just occasionally from her own priests, it is almost impossible to see the real woman. To the Romans, she was fatale monstrum, an unnatural creature to be destroyed. To the priests of Memphis, the ancient Egyptian capital, she was the embodiment of the goddess Aphrodite whom they called Isis. We are forever doomed to see her through a distorted glass.
Nevertheless, for all the colour, excitement and ultimate tragedy of her life, she ruled Egypt for nineteen years, so we must agree that she was actually extraordinarily good at her job. How did her government work? Egypt’s population is impossible to determine. Diodorus Siculus, who visited the country when the future queen was ten years old, estimated it at about three million, but this was probably (and unusually for a Roman) a conservative estimate. Most experts today light on seven million – about the population of Greater London. The country was divided into two geographically – Lower Egypt meant the delta, dominated of course by the artificially created ‘alien’ city of Alexandria, and Upper Egypt, which followed the tortuous meanderings of the Nile into the swamplands of the Sudan. Occasionally there had been rebellions from the south against earlier Ptolemies but in more recent times most of the trouble for the ruling family came from Alexandria itself. Even here, the various ethnic groups tended to operate side by side rather than in unity. The native Egyptians had their own culture, language, priests and law; so did the Jews, who wrote and spoke Aramaic; and of course the Greeks who saw themselves as culturally superior to anybody.
At the apex of Egyptian society were the Ptolemies themselves, personified between 48 and 30 by Cleopatra. They had ruled with varying degrees of success for 300 years, but as pharaohs (the word means literally ‘great house’) they tapped into a system that was 1,000 years old. The role of pharaoh was what it remained in all civilized countries for centuries – he (or in the case of Egypt, sometimes, she) was head of government, commander-in-chief of army and navy, law-giver and, crucially, a semi-divine link between man and the gods. We shall examine the crucial role of religion, superstition and myth in the next chapter, but we must bear it in mind throughout this book. Egyptian, Greek and Roman culture did not exist without this ‘other world’, which paralleled the more humdrum existence on earth.
Below the Ptolemies came an upper-class9 elite – aristocrats, bureaucrats and priests who oiled the wheels of government. These posts were usually hereditary, so that when Pasherentptah, Cleopatra’s high priest, died, it was natural that his son Petubastis should take over, even though the boy was only seven years old. The priests were administrators, lawyers and doctors. Their temples were not only shrines but places of refuge and an important role of the priesthood was to monitor the levels of the Nile, the Egyptian equivalent of watching the stock exchange today in terms of national economy. The Roman republican system, of officials elected for a year and being unable to stand again for ten, would have made no sense at all to the Ptolemies or their people. It is unfortunate for us that the men of their class did not, unlike their Roman counterparts, write letters or gossip about each other, so we do not have the same sense of day-to-day realism from the Ptolemaic court. That many of them were highly unscrupulous, however, cannot be doubted from the events of Cleopatra’s reign. Her brother’s tutor and her army commander plotted her overthrow and murder in 49. When we have examples of Cleopatra intervening personally, it is almost always to deal with a greedy or over-zealous tax collector.
Unusual in the court were the eunuchs, people the Romans found repellent. These men were respected in Alexandria and trusted largely because sex was not likely to feature in any political machinations and high-born families’ girls were safe from molestation. Since Roman law forbade castration, even for slaves (which the eunuchs usually were), men like Octavian saw them as yet another tragic example of the way in which Egypt’s women emasculated men.
Under the elite were what we might loosely term the middle class. As usual in pre-industrial societies, this ambitious, articulate and educated group were probably relatively few in number. Included in this category were the merchants and craftsmen who made and sold the goods that made Egypt (and the Ptolemies through taxation) rich. At the bottom were the masses – peasants who lived in mud-brick hovels along the Nile and in the delta and worked as farm labourers and fishermen. These were the men who dragged the huge blocks of stone for the pyramids and sphinxes that Strabo marvelled at. Life was not completely static for them. The Ptolemies introduced new farming policies, irrigated fields, dammed the Nile and diverted the river in places. Iron blades replaced bronze for the sickles and scythes used at harvest time, but essentially, these people were the timeless ones, anonymous in their lives, unmarked in their deaths. Their generic type is shown in carving and in paint on scores of walls of tombs and temples in ancient Egyptian kingdoms. The Nile flooded in late summer and the new crop was grown in autumn. After the spring harvest, the dry season came with a burning wind from the west. And the whole cycle began again. Even today, standing below the great pyramid at Giza, it is almost unreal to see the Nile, a bright strip of living green at the edge of the limitless sand.
In the fifth century, Herodotus visited the country. It was the Greeks who called the incomprehensible river Neilos; before that the Egyptians knew it as pa iteru aa, the great river. Sometimes, according to legend, it flowed with gold. Ancient Egyptian tombs were called pyramids after Greek cakes of the same shape. Tall, tapering monoliths became obelisks (kebab skewers). Long before the Ptolemies replaced the Persians as Egypt’s rulers, the Greeks were rewriting the country’s culture. Apart from the peculiar urination habits of men and women, Herodotus commented on the almost complete reversal of customs in Egypt. Women bartered in the market-places while men stayed at home and did the weaving. Even here, the looms operated the other way from the Greeks’. Men carried loads on their heads; women on their shoulders. Men did not have to support their parents in their old age; women did. Men had two sets of clothes; women only one. Women carried their babies for fewer weeks than anywhere else – twins and triplets were common. Goats gave birth to five kids rather than the usual two. Pigeons laid twelve eggs, not the commonplace ten. The Nile had living in its mudbanks creatures that were half mice, half sand. The river’s odd behaviour, the people’s odd behaviour, all seemed strange to a civilized visitor, but the Greek Herodotus was every bit as much a ‘johnny-come-lately’ as Strabo was four hundred years later and the Ptolemies had learned to cope with the strangeness of the place.
By Cleopatra’s time, a top-heavy civil service had been streamlined and in the rare glimpses we have of the queen at work running her country, she often intervenes personally, particularly against corrupt officials. The country was divided into forty nomoi (local districts), which all had Greek names by the first century BC. The local governor was the strategos (general) who worked for Cleopatra under the over-arching epistrategos, who we can regard as a sort of chief minister. The elite at court were inevitably Greek – even the Ptolemies’ bodyguards were Macedonians – and this sometimes caused trouble. If an Egyptian wanted to get on, he would have to learn Greek and hope for an appointment. Apart from Cleopatra herself, few Greeks bothered to learn Egyptian.
The government kept a tight control on the economy, which is one reason why Cleopatra was the richest woman in the world at the time. Everybody in Egypt paid taxes, whether it was on salt, fields, drainage ditches or baths. The government also controlled a rudimentary banking system, which issued gold and silver coinage (which frequently had to be debased for economic reasons) and had a monopoly of the textiles, oil and papyrus industries. Cleopatra had several textile workshops of her own, operated by slave women.
Since virtually all the land belonged to Cleopatra, she kept a careful watch, via her bureaucratic record-keepers, on how it was used. Change of usage, perhaps from wheat field to olive grove, needed royal permission. No one could leave their nome (or province) and an army of officials checked inventories, looms and breweries with a thoroughness that makes the Norman Domesday Book in England 1,000 years later look positively amateur.
In one important aspect, the Egypt of the Ptolemies paved the way for the legend of Cleopatra. Greek women – and even more so Roman women – lived in a legal and moral straitjacket designed by men. The Egyptians were more free and easy. So from the century before Cleopatra we find Graeco-Egyptian marriages taking place, in which both languages were spoken in the home and children got used to different names. Women owned property, ran businesses and walked alone in the streets. Those privately taught at home (there were still no formal schools for them) could become doctors, artists, musicians and lawyers. They were rare, but they were there. When the Romans discovered one of them, Cleopatra VII, behaving in this way, they were outraged. Two who were not were Julius Caesar and Mark Antony and, indirectly, they both paid for it with their lives.
2
THE OTHER WORLD
EGYPT, 332
The story of Cleopatra is so well known to us via Shakespeare and the silver screen that we tend to believe we understand her. Her storms and her calms make sense because we are just the same as her. Only 2,000 years separate us and people are people no matter when they live. Whether we see Cleopatra as a seductress, a whore or as a consummate politician and a loving wife and mother, we do so because the events of her life allow us to make comparisons with our own emotions and experiences. Most of us have never been queen of Egypt, nor have we slept with Roman dictators, but we can empathize with the decisions she made, born of the experiences she faced.
Where we cannot see her, for the choking fog of incense, is in the religious dimension of her life. And not only hers, but everyone’s in her story. ‘It is almost impossible,’ writes Guy de la Bédoyère, one of the best ‘Roman’ experts today, ‘to measure the quality and nature of symbolism, ritual and belief. One man’s religious symbol is another man’s decorative motif and yet another’s nightmare.’10
So, three years before Strabo reached Egypt, Octavian caused grave offence to the hereditary priests of the country by refusing to have anything to do with the Apis bull, so revered by them and by Cleopatra. ‘I worship gods, not animals,’ he sneered. In 332, when Alexander of Macedon came to Egypt on his way to the creation of his vast and impossible to maintain empire, he had a dream. His hero Homer came to him and told him to found a great city at that spot on the coast where King Menelaus of Sparta had found himself stranded on his way home from the war with Troy. Our cynical, modern, western world has no time for any of this. Of course, Octavian was right to rubbish a bull and we find his pantheon of gods led by Jupiter to be equally nonsensical. The Trojan War as Homer told it never happened, so how could he know where or even if Menelaus came to Egypt? And even if it were true, what sort of reason is that to found a city? To make these points is to miss the point. These things were real to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, every bit as much as God, Allah, Amida Nyorai and Vahig¯ur¯u are real to some people today. Unless we understand that dreams, omens, prophecies and ritual were an essential part of the lives of the Ptolemies, the Caesars, the Antonys, we shall not see the real Cleopatra at all.
When Alexander of Macedon marched at the head of his invading army into Egypt 300 years before Cleopatra was born, he came to Per-Baster, the shrine of the cat-goddess Bastet. This was the capital of the eighteenth nome of Lower Egypt and Greek travellers before Alexander equated the goddess with their own Artemis, the huntress. This divine equation happened everywhere. Later invaders would dismiss other gods as superstition and mumbo-jumbo but the Greeks (and, to a lesser extent, the Romans) assumed they were the familiar deities but known by different names. The goddess was portrayed by Alexander’s time as a cat-headed woman, carrying a sacred sistrum rattle and a basket. She was the goddess of dancing and music, able to fend off disease and evil spirits. Herodotus wrote of great pilgrimages to Per-Baster (which the Greeks called Bubastis), which brought thousands down the Nile in barges to the melody of flutes and the rhythm of the sistrums. Alexander’s men would have been astonished by the number of mummified cats buried in and around the city.
The army’s next port of call was Iunu, the city of the sun that the Greeks called Heliopolis. This was the cult centre of the sun-god Ra, who was born each morning, was a man by midday and died every evening in old age. This god was so all-powerful – he equates with the Greek Zeus and the Roman Jupiter – that he could assume any shape and went by a number of aliases. From him sprang many of the gods of ancient Egypt – Isis and Osiris, Shu and Tefut, Geb and Nut, Set and Nephthys, all of whom were worshipped at Heliopolis as ‘the divine company’.
Everywhere that Alexander went he was within sight of giant stone representations of the Egyptian gods and the men who, as pharaohs, had lived as living gods, waiting to join the rest in the afterlife. Alexander was welcomed as a liberator in the towns and cities he marched through because he was clearing out the hated Persians and he understood very well that the force with which he had to reckon were the priests. When all was said and done, the pharaoh was only one man, albeit divine. The priesthood was everywhere, the guardians of history, the literate keepers of records, the go-betweens between the pharaoh-god and his people and recognizable instantly by their shaved heads. Plato said, ‘In Egypt, it is not possible for a king to rule without the help of the priests.’11 At Memphis, the ancient Egyptian capital, Alexander was welcomed by the high priest Maatranefer, the ‘master-builder’.
Memphis was in many ways the most holy city of Egypt. Ptah was worshipped here, the creator-god particularly associated with artisans and artists. His effigies usually showed an embalmed figure, wrapped in a winding sheet and head tightly bandaged under the elaborate mummification process. Only his hands are free and in them he holds a sceptre symbolizing omnipotence and stability. Again, he had a number of aliases and was known to ward off dangerous animals and the inevitable evil spirits. The name Egypt derives from Ptah, so the god was very senior in the pantheon of deities. Herodotus, visiting Memphis 200 years before Alexander, was shown the sites of Ptah’s miracles and the nearby temple of Imhotep, the first shrine the Macedonians would have seen that commemorated a man, rather than a god. Imhotep had been the chief architect of King Zoser in the third dynasty and had built Egypt’s first pyramid. The Greeks translated his name as Imuthes, he who comes in peace, and he was associated with learning and culture of all sorts, but especially of medicine. In that respect, the later Greeks equated him with Asclepius, and by Cleopatra’s reign, Imhotep seems to have replaced Ptah as the central god at Memphis.
It was at Memphis that Alexander came across the bull cult that continued to dominate Egyptian religion until Cleopatra’s time. The bull, of course, as a symbol of strength and fertility, was common to Greek spirituality, too. Alexander’s own horse was called Bucephalus, the bullheaded. In Memphis, the Apis bull was venerated. This animal was sacred to Ptah and his reincarnation. This was no ordinary beast, and the priests who tended it lovingly were looking for a very specific hide colouring. Ptah had inseminated a virgin heifer in his guise of heavenly fire and the resulting offspring had to have a white triangle on its forehead, a vulture-shape along its back, a crescent moon on its left flank, a scarab (beetle) shape on its tongue and a double tail. Our cynical age can only assume that a lot of painting and/or wishful thinking went on for priests to continue to find an exact replacement for the bull when the old one died. The Apis bull could tell the future and was consulted much as the Greeks checked regularly with their Oracle at Delphi. The Persians, during their occupancy of Egypt, had twice assassinated the bull and the whole nation had been distraught at the news. At Sakkara, which Alexander also visited, the mummified corpses of these sacred bulls were found by archaeologists in AD 1850. The temple there was called the Serapeum because the dead bull was equated with Osiris, god of the underworld. The far better known Serapeum (Osiris-Apis), which Cleopatra would have known, was built in Alexandria later. The god Serapis, several carvings of whom have been found recently in underwater archaeological digs in the old harbour, was a perfect example of the halfway house between Egyptian and Greek theology. It would be wrong to think of the Serapia as silent, grim mausoleums. They were places of regular pilgrimage, with music, noise and a thriving tourist trade in ‘bull memorabilia’. Professional female mourners were employed to wail and beat their breasts in grief.
When Alexander was crowned pharaoh of Egypt on 14 November 332 he was described during the ceremony as ‘Horus, the strong ruler who takes the lands of the foreigners’ and ‘beloved of Amun and the chosen one of Ra’. In one sense, these gods were interchangeable, but whereas Ra was linked with the sun, Amun was associated with fertility and reproduction. In effigy, he was shown sometimes as a pharaoh with a crown on his head and a flail in his hand. Elsewhere he is carved as a ram with curling horns. It is intriguing that in various coins he had minted, Alexander is shown with ram’s horns in his hair or as part of his helmet. It is possible that, by a circuitous route over the centuries, the idea of the horned god and the devil came from this tradition. Often referred to as ‘his mother’s husband’, Amun represented the pharaonic tradition, continued by the Ptolemies, of incestuous relationships to keep the bloodline pure. Amun-Ra lit the day and even lent a glow to the night, since his light could never be completely extinguished. He also won victories over his enemies, so it was the perfect honorary title to give to Alexander.
As pharaoh, Alexander, like Cleopatra 300 years later, was Egypt’s highest priest and the role was vitally important. In January 331, he travelled west from the Nile delta into Cyrenia (today’s Libya) and got lost in a Saharan sandstorm. Two black ravens appeared and led the expedition to safety. Giving thanks at a temple of Amun, Alexander followed the shrine’s priest into subterranean passageways and emerged later firm in the belief that he was indeed the son of a god. The transition then from ancient Egypt with its animal deities to the Ptolemies with their Greek overlay of religion was assured from the start. It would continue right through to the reign of Cleopatra, after which the Romans dismissed the whole thing as superstition. It is difficult to say when beliefs of this sort disappeared. The arrival of Islam in the seventh century AD certainly drove them underground and eventually eclipsed them, but there is some evidence to believe that Alexander as a living god was still being worshipped 1,000 years after that.
The Ptolemies continued the linked Graeco-Egyptian cult tradition. Arsinoe II, whose sole rule was in some ways a blueprint for Cleopatra’s, was born as ‘Daughter of Ra’ and ‘Daughter of Geb’ (the father of Isis). The pharaonic regalia worn by all the Ptolemies, including Cleopatra, reflect those centuries-old traditions. The red crown was Geb’s. The ram’s horns were Amun’s; the double plumes, cow horns and sun disc belonged to Hathor-Isis. Hathor was Ra’s daughter, the golden one, known to the Greeks as Aphrodite. She is the great heavenly cow, but always shown with a human body and face. The sistrum, a rattle to frighten away evil, is always associated with her, and her shrine at Dendera along the Nile was built to resemble a series of giant rattles. She protected women especially and became linked with motherhood, beauty and love. She was the ‘lady of the sycamore’, hiding in those trees on the edge of the desert and welcoming the dead, who had just climbed her long ladder to heaven, with bread and water. At Dendera, her ‘day’ marked the beginning of the new year and was an excuse for parties, dancing, music and a great deal of drink!
It is with Isis that we most closely associate Cleopatra. The Greeks knew the goddess by a variety of names because she was so all-powerful. She is Selene, the moon; Demeter the corn-goddess; Aphrodite, the goddess of love and sex. In Egyptian belief, Isis was the wife of Osiris, god of the underworld, and their son was Horus, the musician, usually shown as a falcon. The fullest description we have of her story comes from Plutarch, the Romanized Greek who has left us most details on Cleopatra, too. Out of that emerges the notion of embalming, which a distraught Isis carried out on her murdered husband whose body had been dismembered by his brother Set. So clever was Isis that she became indispensible to Ra, enabling him to recover from a deadly snake bite and her future was assured.
She was still being worshipped along the Nile long after Christianity arrived in the fourth century AD and so important was her cult that shrines to her appear all over the Graeco-Roman world as far north as the Rhine in what is today Germany. Her festivals were held in spring and autumn and she is so all-embracing that she is linked with birth and with death and almost everything in between. She is the goddess of sailing and even the ‘wet nurse of the crocodile’.
Not for nothing did Cleopatra work very hard to make herself regarded as the living Isis.
BOOK TWO:DAUGHTER OF THE GENERAL
3
THE SUCCESSOR AND THE SAVIOUR
NEBUCHADNEZZAR’S PALACE, BABYLON, 323
On the first day, he drank and partied with Medius before bathing, sleeping and partying again far into the night. He ate a little, then went to sleep. The fever was already on him.
On the second day he was carried on a litter to perform out the usual sacrifices and he rested in the men’s apartments until dusk. He gave his officers orders about the coming expedition: the army would march on the fourth day; he would go by ship a day later. They carried him to his boat and he sailed across to a garden where he bathed and rested...
...On the eighth day, though very weak, he managed to make the sacrifices. He asked the generals to stay in the hall with the brigadiers and colonels in front of the doors. He was carried back from the garden to the Royal Apartments. He recognized the officers as they passed before him, but said nothing.
And on the tenth day, he died. He was Alexander of Macedon, known as ‘the Great’ and perhaps the greatest general in history. He was thirty-two. In eleven years he had destroyed the mighty Persian Empire and his territory extended from the Danube in the north-west to the Indus in the east. Such military brilliance would never be seen again,12 but the problem with power based on one man is that when that man is gone, a vast hole is left behind. In an age when rulers passed on their power to members of their families, Alexander’s son was still unborn and his brother, Philip Arrhidaios, was a halfwit.
In the last days of his life, Alexander urged his generals to divide the empire among themselves. The problem was that he was dying from what was probably cerebral malaria; his speech was rambling and his intentions unclear. Did he expect one man to succeed him? Or was he orchestrating a bloodbath on Darwinian lines of survival of the fittest? One modern historian refers to the decision as Alexander’s funeral games. The generals who had been prepared to follow Alexander to the ends of the earth would not do that for each other and conflict was inevitable.
The symbolic farewells that Alexander made on 9 June 323 only added to the divisiveness. Perdiccas, his highest-ranking lieutenant, was given his signet ring but it was to Ptolemy that Alexander gave his personal possessions and it was Ptolemy who mounted a vigil in the temple of Serapis, the Graeco-Egyptian god whose carved image Alexander carried with him on campaign. Fighting broke out almost immediately, literally around Alexander’s corpse before the embalmers had gone to work. On the one side were officers under Perdiccas who wanted to govern the empire in the name of Alexander’s unborn son; on the other were those who backed the adult but highly biddable Arrhidaios. It was a no-win situation in terms of stability, but at the birth of Alexander IV in the autumn, he and his uncle were declared joint rulers.
The real power, of course, was the army, a huge fighting force then unrivalled in the world. Perdiccas was in overall control but under him Antigonas ruled Asia Minor, Lysimachos held Thrace (modern Bulgaria), Seleucus had Babylonia, Antipatros claimed Macedonia and the Greek city states. Ptolemy was, according to the Roman chronicler Arrian, ‘appointed to govern Egypt and Libya and those lands of the Arabs that were contiguous to Egypt; and Cleomenes who had been made governor by Alexander was subordinated to Ptolemy’.13
If this was Ptolemy’s idea, it was a shrewd move; if it wasn’t, he made the most of it. Egypt was the most southerly of Alexander’s territories. On the map it looks like a geographical afterthought almost separated from the rest by a narrow land strip at Gaza. Given the speed of communications in the ancient world, Ptolemy might have known he could hold this land for ever, even without his former leader’s affection for it.
As we have seen, Alexander had marched unopposed into Egypt in October 332 and, backed by the fleet sailing south from the Nile delta and along the river itself, he came to Memphis, the ancient Egyptian capital, in triumph.
For years, Egypt had lain under the yoke of Persian domination. In fact, some of the towns Alexander marched through were rubble as a result. Unlike the Persians, the Greeks acknowledged, respected and honoured the lands they conquered. True, they equated the Egyptian pantheon of gods with their own and the Greek culture that they imposed never assimilated with the native one, but Alexander and all his Egyptian successors for 300 years understood the importance of working with the priesthood and nobility, not against them. It was a master-class in empire-building.
The Egyptians, recognizing divinity in Alexander or perhaps realizing he could not be defeated, declared him the successor of Nectanebo, the last native king of Egypt. He was now pharaoh of Upper and Lower Egypt, ‘beloved of Amun and the chosen one of Ra’, and on his deathbed the conqueror whispered that he wanted his body to lie with Amun, hedging his bets perhaps on the existence of an afterlife.
He planned a great city on the Mediterranean coast south of the tiny island of Pharos and in this respect, Alexandrine Egypt would be very different from the ancient country along the Nile, based on Memphis, Thebes and Luxor. Here, at the city named after him, would be built the biggest library in the world and it would be a home to the finest scholars. It would grow and flourish as Alexandria ad Aegyptu to the Romans – Alexandria next to Egypt – an apt metaphor for the cultures that never quite meshed.
So Ptolemy’s choice of Egypt was a good one and, as if to underline the fact and his own closeness to Alexander, he took his master’s embalmed body, in its glittering Egyptian-style sarcophagus, back to the Nile. Perdiccas saw this as an act of treachery. He was anxious to preserve his own position as Alexander’s successor and needed to have the body to prove it.14 Claiming that the body should be interred in Macedonian soil, at Aegae, Perdiccas pursued Ptolemy with a huge force. At Damascus, Ptolemy cleverly switched corpses and continued into Egypt with the real body, leaving Perdiccas to find that the great hearse hung with battle trophies was empty.
This marked the first of many wars among the successors of Alexander, which may, of course, have been what he intended, but Perdiccas’ invasion of Egypt in 321 was a disaster. He lost 2,000 men crossing the Nile at Memphis, their blood mingling with the water as the crocodiles had a field day and Perdiccas himself, facing a mutiny, was murdered.
With peace at home in Egypt and no immediate rivals on the horizon, Ptolemy began a settled regime. He didn’t take the title of king until 305 and like the other successors to Alexander, could claim that he was still acting as regent on behalf of the infant Alexander IV. He had the conqueror’s body buried with Graeco-Egyptian solemnity in Nectanebo’s tomb in the Serapeum at Memphis until the final resting place could be made ready in Alexandria.
The murder and mayhem that we associate with Cleopatra’s family (see Chapter 4) could be found anywhere in the ancient world and by 305, all of Alexander’s immediate family were dead. Ptolemy was sixty by now and known as ‘Soter’, the saviour, a title given to him by the inhabitants of the island of Rhodes to whose rescue he came during his reign. His coins show a strong profile with a prominent hooked nose, which was a characteristic of later Ptolemies and may explain his adoption of the eagle as his personal badge. In the ancient world such symbols were hugely important. In Cleopatra’s day, the eagle had been adopted by Rome (perhaps because of links with Egypt) and Gaius Pompeius (Pompey the Great) deliberately styled his dashing cavalry tactics on those of Alexander, even copying the conqueror’s hairstyle!
We shall look at the heirs of Ptolemy in the next chapter – and it is little short of astonishing that the family should hold on to power in Egypt for three centuries before Cleopatra bit off more than she could chew against the might of increasingly imperial Rome. Cleopatra was, according to some historians, thirty-two parts Greek, twenty-seven parts Macedonian and five parts Persian. The fact that bas-reliefs from her time and various descriptions of her in ‘fact’ and fiction ever since often portray her as purely Egyptian misses the vital starting point of her line. It began with a rough-and-ready soldier, a capable general and steadfast friend, who, against all the odds, died in his bed at the age of eighty-four.
Ptolemy I, the successor and saviour, was cremated according to Macedonian custom and his ashes were placed alongside Alexander’s embalmed body in the city they both had built.
4
THE FAMILY FROM HELL
ALEXANDRIA, 287
Cleopatra’s family tree has been described as more like a cobweb, tangled and, in its own way, deadly. Looking back as we are from 2,000 years later, two things emerge. First is the sheer confusion in a bloodline that contains Ptolemies, Arsinoes and Cleopatras by the dozen. ‘Our’ Cleopatra is the seventh of that name – and the last.15 It is practical to use Roman numerals for them – Ptolemy I, Ptolemy II and so on – and the ever-cynical Alexandrians usually gave them unflattering nicknames. So Ptolemy I Soter (saviour) got off very lightly, but Ptolemy VIII was Physcon (the Fat-bellied) and his father, Ptolemy VII was Neos Philopator (the New Father-loving). The other problem is much more difficult for us to grasp. Elimination by murder was the stock-in-trade of many ruling families in this period, but it was particularly prevalent among the Ptolemies. On the one hand, intermarriage between brothers and sisters, uncles and nieces – which was a Macedonian as well as an Egyptian custom – kept the bloodline pure and perhaps ought to have made for greater harmony. On the other, power politics was clearly more important than bloodlines or emotions, and assassinations were orchestrated on a regular basis. This extended to Cleopatra herself and is another way in which her ‘infinite variety’ is difficult for a twenty-first-century readership to comprehend.
Ptolemy Soter made his younger son Ptolemy co-regent in 287, marking a sort of semi-retirement. The younger Ptolemy was married to a daughter of another of Alexander’s successors, Lysimachos of Thrace, which might have created a unifying situation and helped bind Alexander’s empire. The fly in the ointment, however, was Ptolemy II’s sister, Arsinoe II, who had been married to Lysimachos herself. In an extraordinarily tangled example of family realpolitik, Arsinoe attempted to dispose of her own rivals and those of her children by turning to yet another successor, Seleucus of Babylonia, for help. By 275 she had married her brother Ptolemy II and become co-regent.
It was this Macedonian–Egyptian system of giving supreme political power to women that the Romans could not handle in Cleopatra’s day. Roman women were supposed to be virtuous, supportive of their husbands and excellent mothers. Their sole duties lay in the organization of their households and the ordering about of slaves. Unless they were Vestal Virgins, with a special place of sanctity in Roman eyes, they were excluded from any kind of public position. Murderous women like the emperor Nero’s mother Agrippina were an abomination and foreign women with power – like Cleopatra herself or the Icenian queen Boudicca in Britannia in the far west – were regarded with horror.
Ptolemy II and Arsinoe established the Ptolemaia, a vast festival held every four years, which had Olympic connotations and was both to honour the memory of Alexander and to worship the god Dionysus. Drinking and feasting were the order of the day and eyewitnesses tell of processions of 80,000, with elephants and giraffes laden with exotic imports from Africa and Asia. Huge statues of gods, Greek and Egyptian, were part of these processions, with moving fountains of wine and even an 80-foot-high gold phallus to symbolize the fertility of both the Niles and the Ptolemies.
These were fabulous years for the Ptolemies and their extraordinary wealth was real. Strict laws created taxes on everything from grain to papyrus, and the colossal revenue to the royal family was collected and recorded by a highly efficient and competent civil service that only Rome would surpass 300 years later. The economy was, of course, based on agriculture and slavery, but this was the norm in the ancient world and it would be 2,000 years before anybody seriously thought of an alternative system. The money was spent on making the Egyptian army and, more especially, the navy the largest and most impressive in the world. The Ptolemies also spent a fortune on the shrines of the gods throughout their lands. At the time, this was seen as essential as the gods were all-powerful and must be appeased with lavish presents. In terms of human psychology, it kept the priests happy and in Ptolemaic Egypt and in many states since, the mood was essentially theocratic – the Ptolemies themselves were gods and the priesthood, huge and influential, worshipped them as such.
Trade brought Egypt into contact with the then unimportant city of Rome on the Tiber and the first embassy sent there in 273 marked the official start of a symbiotic relationship that would end fatally for Egypt and for Cleopatra.
Culture for the Ptolemies reached its zenith in the Museion. So used are we to these buildings as collections of old artefacts that we have forgotten its original meaning. It was the home of the muses, where all things cultural were celebrated and the amazing building in Alexandria had laboratories, lecture halls, gardens and even a zoo. At its centre was the legendary library, with its 120,000 scrolls (books) on every topic under the sun. In an extraordinarily ambitious endeavour, successive Ptolemies tried to amass all the world’s knowledge under their own control, which, had it worked, would have been the ultimate in ‘Big Brotherdom’.
The combination of Greek and Egyptian scholars working for the Ptolemies meant that complex histories of both countries were compiled and stored, including decrees sent out in both languages by Ptolemy V, which resulted in the survival of the Rosetta Stone, that enabled scholars of later centuries to decipher ancient hieroglyphs. Priest-physicians carried out vivisection on humans – usually criminals from the royal prisons – discovering the function of arteries, the heart and brain centuries before scientists in the West. Under Ptolemy III, scholars worked out the circumference of the earth and even invented a calendar of 365¼ days.
As each Ptolemy and his wife died, a new shrine or temple was built, each more lavish than the last, enabling the Alexandrians to claim yet more divinity for their dead rulers. Arsinoe II who died at the age of forty-six in 270 was declared the counterpart of the ancient Egyptian gods Osiris, Ra, Ptah and above all Sobek, the crocodile-god. At Mendes, in rituals where Arsinoe was worshipped, one eyewitness was the historian Herodotus who calmly observed ‘a goat tupped a woman in full view of everyone – a most surprising event’.16 It is not clear whether he was referring to the act itself or to the presence of the audience!
The Ptolemies were polygamous and they took mistresses, too, although the Romans dismissed the minor wives as concubines by the time of Caesar’s invasion – again, such practice did not conform to Roman tradition. Ptolemy II died in 246, so grossly obese for the last years of his life that he had to be carried everywhere by litter and spent hours looking enviously out of his window at everybody else moving about.
Ptolemy III, who succeeded him, married his cousin Berenice, confirming the fact that Egypt extended as far west as today’s Tunisia. He also went to war with the Seleucids in Syria and reached as far as Babylon where Alexander had died over a century earlier. The couple were popular and successful, given the nickname Euergetes, the benefactors, and they produced six children. By the time of his death in 222, Ptolemy presided over a vast empire that looked unassailable. Then, family issues kicked in. In accordance with tradition, the widowed Berenice made her son Ptolemy IV co-regent. It may have given Ptolemy Philopator (Father-loving) ideas above his station or it may not have been enough for him because he had his mother and all but one of his siblings murdered. The one allowed to live was fourteen-year-old Arsinoe III whom Ptolemy later married.
Behind the scenes, the king’s mistress, Agathoclea, was the real power in the land, while Ptolemy pursued women and wine in equal measure. Any opponents to this vicious regime, such as the Spartan Cleomenes living in exile at Ptolemy’s court, were killed, the man’s flayed body exhibited to the mob as a warning.
Attempts by the Seleucids to take back parts of their empire grabbed by the earlier Ptolemies failed at the battle of Raphia in June 217 and Ptolemy Philopator probably read this as a sign from the gods. Antiochus the Great, king of Syria, had a massive mixed force of cavalry and infantry as well as 102 Indian elephants. Ptolemy used smaller African elephants but they refused to face their pachyderm opponents and ran.17 Antiochus chased after them with his cavalry while Ptolemy’s infantry held firm and won the day. He now called himself the new Dionysus and had himself tattooed with the god’s symbolic ivy leaves. He also, like all the Ptolemies, associated himself with Alexander and he was responsible for building the astonishing tomb (Soma) in Alexandria, which was another wonder of the world. It may have had a pyramid roof in the Egyptian style and the gold sarcophagus inside was a fitting tribute to the greatest general who had ever lived. The Ptolemies and their principal wives were laid to rest alongside him.
But honouring the dead was not enough to hold a bitterly unpopular regime together. There were few popular risings in Egypt and nothing to equate with the three generations of slave revolts in Roman territory that culminated with that of the gladiator Spartacus in the year of Cleopatra’s birth. From 207, however, the priests of Karnak had had enough of Ptolemy Philopator’s excesses and put forward their own home-grown pharaoh as a rival – Herwennefer of Thebes. At the height of the chaos that followed, Ptolemy died: whether through natural causes (he was almost certainly an alcoholic) or murder is unknown. There is no doubt about Arsinoe III, however – her courtiers killed her, and the couple’s six-year-old son became Ptolemy V.
The real power in the land was Agathoclea, but her mother, Oenanthe, had been Ptolemy III’s mistress in her day and a bloody coup between followers of these two (neither of whom had any right to rule) ended with Agathoclea and other family members being dragged to the Gymnasion and torn apart by the mob. The Greek historian Polybius wrote ‘some bit them, some stabbed them, others cut out their eyes ... For a terrible savagery accompanies the angry passions of the people who live in Egypt.’18 It would be interesting to find out exactly what nationality this mob was; after all, only one-fifth of Alexandria was actually Egyptian.
Under attack again from the Seleucids, who probably got wind of the disaster at the court of Ptolemy, the boy king moved south, to the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis. The rebellion against him was put down, the ringleaders clubbed to death with stone maces at the coronation of the new king, who gave himself the title Ptolemy V Epiphanes, the Revealed. It was the decrees written now, to reveal a new birth of harmony between Greek and Egyptian gods, that are written on the Rosetta Stone.
The Seleucid king Antiochus settled for a marriage alliance rather than the more risky invasion, and at seventeen, Ptolemy was married to Antiochus’ ten-year-old daughter Cleopatra who became the first of that name in the family. This girl, known as the Syrian, was the only example of ‘foreign’ blood to enter the Ptolemy family throughout their 300-year reign, making a nonsense of those today who claim that Cleopatra VII (‘our’ Cleopatra) was black.
With invasion averted and internal revolt put down (Herwennefer was captured but pardoned for the sake of harmony), all should have been well. Ptolemy V lost popularity, however, increasing taxation for foreign wars. He was murdered by his generals in 180. He was the first Ptolemy to be mummified in accordance with pharaonic tradition.
Cleopatra now named her six-year-old son Ptolemy VI Philomater (Mother-loving) as co-regent and went on to become one of the most popular queens of Egypt. Her death at twenty-eight was of natural causes and it is grim testimony to the Ptolemies’ way of doing things that we have to remark on this. Ptolemy Philomater, now about ten, was married to his older sister Cleopatra II and war was resumed with the Seleucids. Their king, Antiochus IV, took Thebes and declared himself co-regent with Ptolemy and Cleopatra.
On 30 July 168 Rome made the first incursion into Graeco-Egyptian affairs. Rome was fighting the third war against Macedonia at the time and needed peace in Egypt to ensure there would be no support from that quarter, perhaps in a nostalgic memory of Alexander. A delegation under Caius Popillius Laenas took a note from the senate to Antiochus demanding that he pull out of Egypt. In accordance with diplomatic tradition – and common sense – Antiochus asked for time to think about it. Laenas drew his sword and scratched a circle in the sand around the invader-king, telling him he couldn’t leave it until he had given the Romans an answer. Antiochus backed down. This gung-ho action seems the stuff of fiction, but it did wonders for Rome’s military reputation and we have to admire Laenas for his sangfroid; his tiny delegation must have been outnumbered hundreds to one. What it meant for the future was that Rome would never be far away.
To make life even more confusing for historians today, there was now a three-way rule among the Ptolemies, similar to, but much cosier than, the triumvirates the Romans would establish in Cleopatra VII’s time. Ptolemy Philomater continued to rule with his elder sister but a younger brother, also called Ptolemy, joined them as Ptolemy VIII. This three-way split was almost bound to fail and did, Ptolemy VI running to Rome for help to get ‘his’ kingdom back after being deposed by the other two. The upshot was that Ptolemy VI and Cleopatra II continued to rule in Egypt while Ptolemy VIII governed Cyrenia.
So far, so complicated, but it gets worse. Ptolemy VI and Cleopatra II effectively ignored Ptolemy VIII who had gone so far in crawling to Rome that he left all he owned to the city of the seven hills in his will. The royal couple produced Ptolemy VII as their heir and when his father was killed in a fall from his horse, the boy was made co-regent with Cleopatra II.
Re-enter Ptolemy VIII, known as Physcon (the Fat-bellied). All the Ptolemies were obese, but Physcon must have been extremely large to merit the Alexandrian nickname. He revelled in the image as a sign of wealth and opulence and invaded Egypt to claim what he saw as his rightful heritage. In a scene straight out of a horror movie, Ptolemy VII was murdered at the wedding feast of Physcon and Cleopatra II, the boy literally dying in his mother’s arms. A ‘night of the long knives’ followed, in which any potential opposition to Physcon was removed by assassination or exile. The Alexandrians might have ridiculed Physcon behind his huge back and the Romans laughed at him when they saw him waddle to meet a delegation in 139, but officially he called himself Euergetes, the Benefactor. Most of the benefaction went to Egypt as, during his reign, Physcon promoted native Egyptians into court positions and officially recognized the power of the priests of Thebes and Memphis. One of his sons was called Ptolemy Memphites to underline the Egyptian-ness of the line. Cleopatra was happy to continue this tradition.
As soon as was expedient, Physcon removed Cleopatra II and married her daughter, Cleopatra III, who now became, in men’s minds, the living Isis. Cleopatra II’s popularity, however, forced Physcon into another three-way government, the two Cleopatras being officially referred to as ‘the wife’ and ‘the sister’ to avoid confusion. Cleopatra III became the mother of Ptolemies IX and X and of the three Cleopatras Tryphaena, IV and Selene.
Again the threesome collapsed, Cleopatra II forcing Physcon out in a palace coup, and this led to open warfare backed by her Jewish troops. In 132, Physcon wobbled his way to safety in Cyprus where he had Cleopatra’s son Memphites murdered. The boy’s mutilated remains were sent back to his mother in a jar. Once again, Physcon invaded, burning his enemies alive in the courtyard of the Gymnasion, but internal revolts would not let him resume rule by himself and the unlikely threesome was back in place.
A psychiatrist would have a field day with the Ptolemies and would not be remotely surprised by the actions of Cleopatra II’s eldest daughter Thea. She now ruled in Syria, having been married to three Seleucid kings who all pre deceased her, and tried to kill her own son first by firing an arrow at him and then by poisoning his wine. In a scene that Shakespeare may have stolen for Hamlet, the boy, Antiochus VIII Grypus (the Hook-nosed) forced his mother to quaff the goblet instead.
Against all the odds, Physcon died in his bed in June 116, leaving Cyrenia to his eldest son, Ptolemy Apion. Egypt and Cyprus went to Cleopatra III and her choice of son – Ptolemy IX – who would rule with her. So once again two Cleopatras ruled together, joined by Ptolemy IX Soter Lathyrus (Chickpea the Saviour), who wore his hair long like Alexander.
On the death of Cleopatra II, Cleopatra III became the Female Horus and when the historian Pansanius wrote that ‘we know of none of the kings so hated by his mother’ he was talking about the relationship between her and Chickpea. Her eldest daughter Cleopatra Tryphaena was married off to Grypus and the next, Cleopatra IV, married Antiochus IX. Since Grypus and Antiochus were half-brothers locked in a deadly war with each other, it followed that the sisters became bitter enemies too. The upshot here was that Tryphaena had Cleopatra IV murdered in the temple of Apollo, her hands hacked off as she clung, screaming, to the god’s statue.
In Egypt, yet another three-way government resulted – Cleopatra III, her hated son Chickpea and the remaining daughter/sister Cleopatra Syrene. Using Chickpea’s absence from Alexandria as an excuse, Cleopatra III claimed that he had tried to kill her (which would hardly be surprising) and replaced him with her youngest son, Ptolemy X, who took the nom du roi of Alexander and even borrowed the conqueror’s helmet from the Soma to emphasize the point, complete with elephant skin and ram’s horns. Cleopatra III became the most despised of the queens of that name. She gave herself five personal cults and sent hit men after Chickpea, who had fled for his life to Cyprus. The Alexandrians called her Cocce, the scarlet one, a euphemism for vagina.
The war between mother and son ended with the death of Cleopatra III, perhaps murdered by her ‘loyal’ son Ptolemy Alexander, who by now was far too fat to embody his namesake in any meaningful sense. Alexandrians called him, with contempt, Cocce’s child, but the Egyptians loved him after he let his sister marry into the Memphis priesthood. Ptolemy Alexander himself married his niece Berenice III who (no doubt to confuse us still further) took the honoured name of Cleopatra. The legend ran in Egypt that stonemasons left cartouches on their work blank because of the rapid turnover of rulers.
Rome was now at the gates of Egypt, extending their power with Ptolemy Appion’s blessing over Cyrenia in 96. Ptolemy Alexander was overthrown by his army and fled to his sister Selene for safety. With a mercenary army of Syrians he invaded Egypt and committed the ultimate sacrilege by melting down Alexander the Great’s gold sarcophagus and replacing it with glass. The gold was used to pay his unreliable troops. His death in a naval battle with the Alexandrians saw the return of Chickpea.
All Egyptian politics from now on took place under the shadow of Rome. Not content with stealing Ptolemy’s eagle emblem for their own and becoming a major buyer of Egyptian corn, the Republic now claimed that Ptolemy X Alexander had left Egypt to Rome in his will, as had Physcon before him. Rome had its own problems in the early first century BC and for now Chickpea ruled with Cleopatra-Berenice until his death in 81. Now Rome acted, sending Ptolemy XI Alexander II to rule alongside Berenice. The Alexandrians called him Pareisactus, the usurper, which seemed to say it all. Within eighteen days, the usurper had his stepmother-wife murdered and an appalled citizenry dragged him to the Gymnasion where the mob tore him to pieces. It was a grim action replay of Berenice II and Arsinoe III in 203.
Now the direct, legitimate line of Alexander came to an end. The Alexandrians ignored Rome’s bullying and elected their own Ptolemy as ruler. This was Ptolemy XII, the illegitimate son of Ptolemy IX, and he came to be known as Auletes, the Piper.19 He married his sister Cleopatra Tryphaena in January 79 and they became the ‘father-loving gods’ and the ‘brother-and-sister-loving gods’, which continued to please the traditionalist Egyptians. He also called himself the new Dionysus and played his pipe in the revels held in honour of the drunken god.
The couple’s first child, Berenice IV was born some time between 80 and 75 but after 69 we hear of only one daughter, ‘our’ Cleopatra, the last of the pharaohs.
5
CLEOPATRA THE WISE
ALEXANDRIA, 69
Bearing in mind how iconic Cleopatra has become over the centuries and how widely known, we have almost no knowledge of her birth or early life.
She was probably born in 69 BC, but it may have been 70. She was probably born in Alexandria, in the royal palaces there, but we cannot be sure. We have no clear idea who her mother was (which is where the current controversy over the black Cleopatra comes in – see Chapters 18 and 19), who attended her birth and what form the birth actually took.
The problem arises because of our lack of day-to-day knowledge of Ptolemy Auletes’ court. We know that Alexandria and the Ptolemies always lay slightly outside Egyptian culture and not part of it. There had been a sort of intermarriage of the gods’ pantheon and an elevation of the native priesthood that would reach its height under Cleopatra, but in important matters like the birth of a princess, which culture’s wisdom would be followed? It was probably Greek, but we cannot preclude the Egyptian.
In ancient Egypt20 signs of pregnancy included changes to skin pigmentation and eye colour. A pregnant woman would invariably have a cold back but a hot neck. Her urine could be used to detect the sex of the foetus by sprinkling it on wheat and barley grains. If the wheat germinated first, the child would be female, if vice versa, a boy. All fertility was, of course, associated with the gods. Bes, the dwarf-god, was linked with childbirth, but so were Taweret and Hathor. We have met Hathor before. There were seven or nine versions of this goddess so that she has been likened to fairy godmothers. At Cleopatra’s birth house at Armant, they are shown as beautiful young women and they appeared at a child’s birth to foretell its future. Taweret is universally shown as a pregnant hippopotamus, with huge breasts and standing on her hind legs. She holds a roll of papyrus and is linked with suckling as well as vengeance.
Bes, although appearing at birth, was essentially a marriage-god. He is facially repellent, which is odd for a deity so concerned with